The Cooler

The Xigmatek 082 cooler is really just a modified version of their 055 cooler that we reviewed a little while back. The main differences are that it uses heat pipes as the contact base, and has three pipes compared to the four of the 055. The cooler is 240 grams lighter than the 055 weighing in at 410 grams and stands 134mm high.

The build of the cooler's heat sink is very well done; It is made of Aluminum with the exception of the heat pipes which are composed of Copper. The fins are not too thick yet are quite strong so they don't bend easily and there are no loose parts on the cooler.

Xigmatek provides a little Aluminum spoiler that clips into the back of the cooler to help cool other parts of the motherboard such as MOSFETs and other voltage regulators. The fin can be placed at any level on the cooler, but he optimal spot is about one third of the way up from the bottom of the sink.

Four rubber mounts are used to mount the 92mm fan - I really like this system because it's very secure and offers some vibration dampening ability that will help reduce noise. The top of the base is slotted for the retention clip to line up in and there's two screw holes to mount the 775 retention clips.

The fan is rated for 39 ~ 54.6CFM at 1200 - 2800 RPM (±10%). I did find it quite loud on full speed, however it moves a lot of air. One nice feature of the fan is that it has PWM (pulse-width modulation) which is a 4 pin Molex connector. This connector is only seen on new motherboards and is just a different way of controlling the fan's speed. It produces a much cleaner voltage, which in return makes the fan more efficient and quieter in operation. Don't worry if your board doesn't have one of the 4 pin connectors - the fan can still use just the regular 3 pins (or even 2 pins) to run the fan.

The heart of the cooler - The direct touching heat pipes. We recently reviewed a cooler with the same design and it proved to work very well and hopefully it will for Xigmatek. The whole purpose of heat pipes is to transfer heat away from the CPU; So engineers thought that the heat pipes should have as best contact with the heat source as possible. The only better way other than having the heat pipes part of the contact base is to have them making up the contact base. This will insure they have the maximum heat conduction, and therefore be able to do their job to their fullest potential.